BC. Laurence Binyon: Primary Materials

1. [Binyon]. Review of The Ideals of the East (see D16), by Kakuzô Okakura. TLS, 6 March 1903, pp. 73-74.

Takes exception to particular parts of Okakura’s thesis, but nonetheless finds his work of ‘extraordinary interest’. The unsigned review is attributed to Binyon by Hatcher, who suggests that Ideals and Okakura’s Book of Tea introduced Binyon to the ‘facets of Taoism and Zen Buddhism that would colour his . . . writing on Oriental art and his thinking in general’ (43, p. 165). Thirty years later Binyon relies on the central thesis of Ideals of the East in the second of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard (see 27).